bluestarultor
02-03-2011, 07:08 PM
Well, Blue's on a new MMO now (quickly, I know), but after Sword 2's ridiculously fast leveling, I figured I'd give Allods a try after hearing about it here, checking the site, blowing it off, then randomly finding a rave review not 15 minutes later. I wrote this as part of a bunch of reviews of MMOs I've played, but, quoth I:
This is the one I replaced Sword 2 with. Allods was initially described to me as a "WoW clone" and it quite frankly is. You have the equivalents of the Alliance and Horde, named the League and Empire, respectively. The League consists of humans, elves, and what they call Gibberlings, which are a group of three individually-customizable siblings that are basically midget puppy-people with beards. Females included. The Empire consists of a different faction of humans, robot zombies called Arisen, and orcs.
This thing is from gPotato, the people behind Flyff, and, being totally honest, does in fact shamelessly rip off WoW. The art style is similar, the factions are presented similarly, and there's a similarity in the mutual threat to both sides, only instead of undead armies, it's "Astral," a plot-convenient substance that kills anything it touches, which through valiant magical efforts means the world is essentially a mess of unconnected bubble domes. Not to worry, though, because meteorites apparently protect you from it and can be used so you can make a ship of some sort requiring you and five of your friends to pilot so you can explore the world. Joy. I need five friends to even get around this place? I don't even have that many who PLAY MMOs!
At any rate, this one is already on a second chance and I'll tell you why. It fucks with you. The game starts out in a tower which is immediately attacked and gives you a crash course in keyboard controls. "What?" I asked myself. "No click-to-move?" I tried it and failed and thus was forced to make my way around using WSAD to move around and E and Q to turn. Yes, you don't even turn automatically. You strafe or walk backwards at half the speed it would be useful for due to realistic movement. Your characters do automatically orient on the camera, though, so right-click-and-drag plus holding down W was the best available method of getting around, and works fairly well once you finally get used to the turning. You get several very basic missions to get you up to level 3, including equipment rewards, but the game is simply hard to control, and I had to turn the graphics down to minimum to kill my lag (admittedly my laptop's fault, not the game's).
When it comes to combat, the game is a bit aggravating. I decided, since there seems to be no bars on jumping the fence on factions, to start with a Gibberling trio. A note on that, you name and customize all three as individual characters, but thus far, only the designated leader's name matters, and it would have been nice if their names were, you know, concatenated into one for data storage purposes or at least availability. So I had to waste three 4-12-character alphanumeric-only names and only one has ever shown up. And then it tossed out my capitalization and dropped all the capitals but the first, which I assume would have been capialized if it hadn't been already. Limiting names that badly is not a good start. At the very least, allow custom caps and underscores. It's used to make sure NPCs are instantly identifiable, but that could have been done with a symbol, or just the spaces since they're used so heavily.
At any rate, combat. First off, even in Baby's First Tower, I kept on nearly dying. Every ten seconds, in fact, if it hadn't been for NPCs conveniently insta-healing me to full. I couldn't figure out why until I noticed my triplets weren't attacking so much as flailing around from all the hits the monsters were gladly ganking me with. Because you WILL get ganged up on. Every aggro in that place goes directly for you unless they're already occupied, and if you get too close, they'll break off and aggro you. I chose the Psychic-based class for the race, the Seer, just because that was the race's only nuker. Casting can, in fact, get interrupted, but by what is a mystery. It happened once or twice, but mostly casting just restarted when I took a hit. Being that all the enemies were melee and closed in like I was magnetized, I decided to fuck it and just melee them to death. This continued on for most of the dungeon until I finally noticed when I tried to melee, my attack icon drained and then refilled over a cooldown. And stayed that way. Almost all of the foes in the tower had been killed for me by all the NPCs! Ones I was supposed to have been ESCORTING! Attacking is treated like spellcasting and after selecting an enemy and hitting the 1 key, you hit them once and then stand there like a tard. Just to sweeten the deal, remeber what I said about the normal controls only facing you in one direction and manually turning? Well, that also applies to attacking. I tried throwing a spell at an enemy behind me and all I got was a message saying it wasn't in front of me and I couldn't hit it. WHAT!? You're telling me that between my three little furballs not one of them would suggest to the designated spellcaster of the trio to turn around and zap someone attacking them all from behind!? But no, apparently not. If it's beside or behind you, you have to face it manually before you can do anything about it. Or, because characters seem able to freely defy solidity with each other, back up through it and attack from your new position.
And just to make it COMPLETELY insufferable, as soon as you're teleported out of the tower, you get a massive stream of help tips, one of which tells you click-to-move was available the whole damn time and you just needed to turn it on in the options! Apparently this is disabled by default because they couldn't otherwise figure out how to let you single-click to select anything, because once you enable it, selecting things needs to be done with a double-click. It would be worse if they hadn't had the sense to allow you to select the nearest selectable object with the Tab key.
Speaking of which, you have several keys set aside to interact with different objects. No, you can't click to interact, either. You clck to select, then hit Z, or X, or any of the others on that row depending on how much you have near you.
The game is like the MMO equivalent of Tomb Raider controls.
I actally started this review ready to trash the game, and short of a bit of cleanup, all that came before this sentence is preserved in that. But once I turned on the click options and did enough fetch quests to level up, the game magically turned around. Within the options, there are two disabled clicking options. Turning them both on allows you to double-click things to move to and interact with them at the same time, so basically there are fairly standard controls buried in there. It's just unacceptable that these very standard features are disabled by default. Said options also help with the whole attacking things in front of you, too. Another plus is the town portal item has only a 15-minute cooldown, which is pretty forgiving, all told.
Play-wise, its second chance is going well. There's real potential for a good game buried in here. Keyboard controls as a supplement to mouse controls work quite well and the enemeis are done ganging up on me now that I'm not "under attack." The lore is also well-written and one of the minigames, "Goblin Ball," had me laughing for a full minute as I read about it on the main site. It's exactly what it sounds like - soccer with a live goblin as the ball - but the way it was led up to with the whole rich history and how it changed society abruptly juxtaposed with the ridiculousness of the game itself totally made my day. Sometimes the ridiculous being said with a straight face makes something funnier than the ridiculousness alone ever could.
The Seer is actually an interesting little class. It starts out as a standard casting class, but the skills it soon gains force you to treat it differently from a standard nuker. One of the early skills is "Mind Link," which continually drains MP in exchange for a 15% bonus on all your spell damage on your target enemy. This one skill becomes important for other reasons. It's also used specifically for other skills. One of the other early skills relies on breaking the mind link to do damage and it quite frankly does a good amount. Unlike a standard nuker, which is very straightforward, the Seer makes you stalk your prey a bit to cast a mind link on them, which makes me personally feel delightfully sneaky. See, making a mind link doesn't count as an attack and therefore, you effectively do it without the target being aware. After that, you can let loose with your nuking spells to start combat properly, and, when the enemy is low enough, whip out your link-breaker, which has an instant cast time.
Formulaic? Yes, but then so is playing your nuker like a piano or slashing away as a fighter. Very few magical classes make you hunt your target. And it really does fit with the race. The Gibberlings are small and reminiscent of maybe some sort of Brownie or Gnome, with tiny legs, Popeye arms, big heads, beards for both sexes, and rotund bodies. They're small and cute, but also puckish and devious. These are the old stories' sort of small folk, who will help you if you're kind to them, but God help you if you piss them off, because they will END you. It will be convoluted and indirect and you will never see it coming. Even one of their idles is a small huddle between the three of them, no doubt planning mischief, and another is posing confidently. The trio combines comical and cuddly with capable and crafty.
Oh, and a note on the language of the game. Be it because it's still a work in progress or not, you'll be seeing and hearing snippets of Russian. The install seems to have been written in Cyrillic based on what popped up on my toolbar and while the text is of course English, some of the speech is in Russian. Which is fine by me, since I consider it a beautiful language with a beautiful accent, but this is just a heads-up for people wondering why their mage is speaking gibberish.
The world as it's starting to open up to me is well-done and you have the standard set pieces, like plants that can be gathered, local fauna to kill, et cetera, and it's all surprisingly detailed. The Gibberlings don't all jump in full synch with each other and the jump height and order are randomized into a complex array of patterns. The early quests are all simple enough and are pretty standard opening fare.
Really, I do recommend this game. I just recommend enabling the mouse controls for it to make your life easier. After a rocky start, this is one of the few games I've tried that's kept me excited over it, rather than just liking it. It has a kind of charm to it that has more of an energy than the subdued Perfect World, but a proper fantasy feel and consistency to it that Sword 2 lacked, and the leveling system seems much more honest than either of theirs, being slow from the get-go instead of the standard "catch them with fast levels and make them grind after level 10" that PW did or the insanely fast leveling of Sword 2. Levels in this game actually mean something so far and aren't out to trap you. In fact, pretty much nothing is. Out to trap you, that is. With a hectic intro and very little in the way of hooks, this is one that almost seems to do the opposite: throw a ton at you right off the bat and see if you're in it for the long haul. I have to say if it hadn't been for my brother getting into it and insisting we play together, I probably would have set it down, but once I got down to actual real play, I'm glad I didn't. As a free MMO, they can afford to do that, and I have to say I've quickly come to like it and respect it for its approaches to many aspects of the game I didn't mention here.
The site is here: http://allods.gpotato.com/
Some things I neglected to mention:
- both my brother and I have frame rate issues, even though traffic is supposed to be low
- certain aggro enemies WILL still rape you (like lynxes)
- if playing a psychic class, your first new ability should be the body double, as it will save your ass
- enemies will aggro you while harvesting, even if they're normally placid
- MP may as well be infinite with how little you use and how fast it regens
- HP may seem infinite if you're doing well, but if you're being ganged up on by aggros, it becomes significantly less so
This is the one I replaced Sword 2 with. Allods was initially described to me as a "WoW clone" and it quite frankly is. You have the equivalents of the Alliance and Horde, named the League and Empire, respectively. The League consists of humans, elves, and what they call Gibberlings, which are a group of three individually-customizable siblings that are basically midget puppy-people with beards. Females included. The Empire consists of a different faction of humans, robot zombies called Arisen, and orcs.
This thing is from gPotato, the people behind Flyff, and, being totally honest, does in fact shamelessly rip off WoW. The art style is similar, the factions are presented similarly, and there's a similarity in the mutual threat to both sides, only instead of undead armies, it's "Astral," a plot-convenient substance that kills anything it touches, which through valiant magical efforts means the world is essentially a mess of unconnected bubble domes. Not to worry, though, because meteorites apparently protect you from it and can be used so you can make a ship of some sort requiring you and five of your friends to pilot so you can explore the world. Joy. I need five friends to even get around this place? I don't even have that many who PLAY MMOs!
At any rate, this one is already on a second chance and I'll tell you why. It fucks with you. The game starts out in a tower which is immediately attacked and gives you a crash course in keyboard controls. "What?" I asked myself. "No click-to-move?" I tried it and failed and thus was forced to make my way around using WSAD to move around and E and Q to turn. Yes, you don't even turn automatically. You strafe or walk backwards at half the speed it would be useful for due to realistic movement. Your characters do automatically orient on the camera, though, so right-click-and-drag plus holding down W was the best available method of getting around, and works fairly well once you finally get used to the turning. You get several very basic missions to get you up to level 3, including equipment rewards, but the game is simply hard to control, and I had to turn the graphics down to minimum to kill my lag (admittedly my laptop's fault, not the game's).
When it comes to combat, the game is a bit aggravating. I decided, since there seems to be no bars on jumping the fence on factions, to start with a Gibberling trio. A note on that, you name and customize all three as individual characters, but thus far, only the designated leader's name matters, and it would have been nice if their names were, you know, concatenated into one for data storage purposes or at least availability. So I had to waste three 4-12-character alphanumeric-only names and only one has ever shown up. And then it tossed out my capitalization and dropped all the capitals but the first, which I assume would have been capialized if it hadn't been already. Limiting names that badly is not a good start. At the very least, allow custom caps and underscores. It's used to make sure NPCs are instantly identifiable, but that could have been done with a symbol, or just the spaces since they're used so heavily.
At any rate, combat. First off, even in Baby's First Tower, I kept on nearly dying. Every ten seconds, in fact, if it hadn't been for NPCs conveniently insta-healing me to full. I couldn't figure out why until I noticed my triplets weren't attacking so much as flailing around from all the hits the monsters were gladly ganking me with. Because you WILL get ganged up on. Every aggro in that place goes directly for you unless they're already occupied, and if you get too close, they'll break off and aggro you. I chose the Psychic-based class for the race, the Seer, just because that was the race's only nuker. Casting can, in fact, get interrupted, but by what is a mystery. It happened once or twice, but mostly casting just restarted when I took a hit. Being that all the enemies were melee and closed in like I was magnetized, I decided to fuck it and just melee them to death. This continued on for most of the dungeon until I finally noticed when I tried to melee, my attack icon drained and then refilled over a cooldown. And stayed that way. Almost all of the foes in the tower had been killed for me by all the NPCs! Ones I was supposed to have been ESCORTING! Attacking is treated like spellcasting and after selecting an enemy and hitting the 1 key, you hit them once and then stand there like a tard. Just to sweeten the deal, remeber what I said about the normal controls only facing you in one direction and manually turning? Well, that also applies to attacking. I tried throwing a spell at an enemy behind me and all I got was a message saying it wasn't in front of me and I couldn't hit it. WHAT!? You're telling me that between my three little furballs not one of them would suggest to the designated spellcaster of the trio to turn around and zap someone attacking them all from behind!? But no, apparently not. If it's beside or behind you, you have to face it manually before you can do anything about it. Or, because characters seem able to freely defy solidity with each other, back up through it and attack from your new position.
And just to make it COMPLETELY insufferable, as soon as you're teleported out of the tower, you get a massive stream of help tips, one of which tells you click-to-move was available the whole damn time and you just needed to turn it on in the options! Apparently this is disabled by default because they couldn't otherwise figure out how to let you single-click to select anything, because once you enable it, selecting things needs to be done with a double-click. It would be worse if they hadn't had the sense to allow you to select the nearest selectable object with the Tab key.
Speaking of which, you have several keys set aside to interact with different objects. No, you can't click to interact, either. You clck to select, then hit Z, or X, or any of the others on that row depending on how much you have near you.
The game is like the MMO equivalent of Tomb Raider controls.
I actally started this review ready to trash the game, and short of a bit of cleanup, all that came before this sentence is preserved in that. But once I turned on the click options and did enough fetch quests to level up, the game magically turned around. Within the options, there are two disabled clicking options. Turning them both on allows you to double-click things to move to and interact with them at the same time, so basically there are fairly standard controls buried in there. It's just unacceptable that these very standard features are disabled by default. Said options also help with the whole attacking things in front of you, too. Another plus is the town portal item has only a 15-minute cooldown, which is pretty forgiving, all told.
Play-wise, its second chance is going well. There's real potential for a good game buried in here. Keyboard controls as a supplement to mouse controls work quite well and the enemeis are done ganging up on me now that I'm not "under attack." The lore is also well-written and one of the minigames, "Goblin Ball," had me laughing for a full minute as I read about it on the main site. It's exactly what it sounds like - soccer with a live goblin as the ball - but the way it was led up to with the whole rich history and how it changed society abruptly juxtaposed with the ridiculousness of the game itself totally made my day. Sometimes the ridiculous being said with a straight face makes something funnier than the ridiculousness alone ever could.
The Seer is actually an interesting little class. It starts out as a standard casting class, but the skills it soon gains force you to treat it differently from a standard nuker. One of the early skills is "Mind Link," which continually drains MP in exchange for a 15% bonus on all your spell damage on your target enemy. This one skill becomes important for other reasons. It's also used specifically for other skills. One of the other early skills relies on breaking the mind link to do damage and it quite frankly does a good amount. Unlike a standard nuker, which is very straightforward, the Seer makes you stalk your prey a bit to cast a mind link on them, which makes me personally feel delightfully sneaky. See, making a mind link doesn't count as an attack and therefore, you effectively do it without the target being aware. After that, you can let loose with your nuking spells to start combat properly, and, when the enemy is low enough, whip out your link-breaker, which has an instant cast time.
Formulaic? Yes, but then so is playing your nuker like a piano or slashing away as a fighter. Very few magical classes make you hunt your target. And it really does fit with the race. The Gibberlings are small and reminiscent of maybe some sort of Brownie or Gnome, with tiny legs, Popeye arms, big heads, beards for both sexes, and rotund bodies. They're small and cute, but also puckish and devious. These are the old stories' sort of small folk, who will help you if you're kind to them, but God help you if you piss them off, because they will END you. It will be convoluted and indirect and you will never see it coming. Even one of their idles is a small huddle between the three of them, no doubt planning mischief, and another is posing confidently. The trio combines comical and cuddly with capable and crafty.
Oh, and a note on the language of the game. Be it because it's still a work in progress or not, you'll be seeing and hearing snippets of Russian. The install seems to have been written in Cyrillic based on what popped up on my toolbar and while the text is of course English, some of the speech is in Russian. Which is fine by me, since I consider it a beautiful language with a beautiful accent, but this is just a heads-up for people wondering why their mage is speaking gibberish.
The world as it's starting to open up to me is well-done and you have the standard set pieces, like plants that can be gathered, local fauna to kill, et cetera, and it's all surprisingly detailed. The Gibberlings don't all jump in full synch with each other and the jump height and order are randomized into a complex array of patterns. The early quests are all simple enough and are pretty standard opening fare.
Really, I do recommend this game. I just recommend enabling the mouse controls for it to make your life easier. After a rocky start, this is one of the few games I've tried that's kept me excited over it, rather than just liking it. It has a kind of charm to it that has more of an energy than the subdued Perfect World, but a proper fantasy feel and consistency to it that Sword 2 lacked, and the leveling system seems much more honest than either of theirs, being slow from the get-go instead of the standard "catch them with fast levels and make them grind after level 10" that PW did or the insanely fast leveling of Sword 2. Levels in this game actually mean something so far and aren't out to trap you. In fact, pretty much nothing is. Out to trap you, that is. With a hectic intro and very little in the way of hooks, this is one that almost seems to do the opposite: throw a ton at you right off the bat and see if you're in it for the long haul. I have to say if it hadn't been for my brother getting into it and insisting we play together, I probably would have set it down, but once I got down to actual real play, I'm glad I didn't. As a free MMO, they can afford to do that, and I have to say I've quickly come to like it and respect it for its approaches to many aspects of the game I didn't mention here.
The site is here: http://allods.gpotato.com/
Some things I neglected to mention:
- both my brother and I have frame rate issues, even though traffic is supposed to be low
- certain aggro enemies WILL still rape you (like lynxes)
- if playing a psychic class, your first new ability should be the body double, as it will save your ass
- enemies will aggro you while harvesting, even if they're normally placid
- MP may as well be infinite with how little you use and how fast it regens
- HP may seem infinite if you're doing well, but if you're being ganged up on by aggros, it becomes significantly less so